Editorial
It has been six months since I began my role as Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuit and Systems (TCAD). As most of you know, under the leadership of the previous EIC Prof. Giovanni De Micheli TCAD moved to a complete electronic submission and review system. This transition considerably shortened the review cycle while maintaining a high quality publication. The transaction continues to be a premiere journal in electronic design automation, attracting the best work in this field. I thank Prof. Giovanni De Micheli for his outstanding leadership and dedication. Although it will be difficult for me to fill his shoes, my goal is to preserve past accomplishments and continually improve TCAD.
First of all, the electronic submission and review system continues to be the same as that under Prof. Giovanni De Micheli. His immense help with the transition is greatly appreciated. This electronic system enables checks on the status of a paper whereby potential delays in reviews or decisions can be easily identified and corrective action can be taken. The author and reviewer databases were transferred as is. In fact, authors and reviewers should not see major differences other than a change of the website address. Some enhancements were also made during the transition. These include an improved interface for uploading the electronic file for a paper. Also, authors can now upload either a pdf or a ps file. In the future, the plan is to move to a system that only accepts pdf files.
As of today the TCAD website has received a total of 244 regular issue papers (including revisions and 57 papers which are revisions from Prof. De Micheli's database). An additional 68 papers have been submitted to forthcoming special issues on Behavioral Modeling and Simulation, International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD2002), and the Design Automation Conference (DAC2002). This is a particularly large number of papers to handle and I appreciate the help and dedication of the Associate Editors (AEs) and reviewers. I thank the AEs for their efforts and support in making TCAD a high quality journal. Two new areas have been added to the TCAD editorial board with dedicated AEs. These are Analog CAD and Reconfigurable Systems. At present decisions have been made on 127 regular issue papers. These include 41 papers that have been accepted for publication (33 from Prof. De Micheli’s database), 51 papers for which the authors have been asked to make revisions, and 33 papers that have been rejected.
The processing times for these papers are shown in the table below. The entries are to be interpreted as follows. All times are in days and are counted from the date of submission of papers. Columns two through five of the first row, list in order, the mean times taken by the EIC to make any decision (i.e., a decision to accept, a decision to recommend revision, and a decision to reject). The next four columns list the same for AEs. The second and third rows are similar to the first, except that they list the maximum and minimum times, respectively. Since the number of papers processed so far is small and several papers were revisions from the previous database, the average times are somewhat optimistic. The goal is to have the mean decision times to be under 100 days. There will be some pathological cases that require a much longer time to reach a decision as seen by the overall maximum of 201 days. However, an attempt will be made to keep these to a minimum.
|
|
EIC's Decision |
AEs' Recommendation
|
||||||
|
|
Overall |
Accept |
Revise |
Reject |
Overall |
Accept |
Revise |
Reject |
|
Mean |
62 |
43 |
78 |
56 |
61 |
43 |
78 |
56 |
|
Maximum |
201 |
116 |
201 |
146 |
201 |
114 |
201 |
146 |
|
Minimum |
3 |
3 |
12 |
3 |
2 |
2 |
9 |
3 |
I am striving towards timely publication of high quality papers with the help of a technically strong, energetic and dedicated editorial board. The journal depends on the technical community to submit their work for publication. I encourage all prospective authors to submit high caliber research work so that this journal continues to be the best in the field. Also, if any of you have suggestions for improvements please send me an email (tcad@ece.orst.edu).
Kartikeya Mayaram
Editor-in-Chief
July 1, 2002